There's nothing in the wallet.dat file that even remotely resembles the contents of a Bitcoin wallet. Presumably there has been filesystem corruption.

I told the owner I couldn't do any more with the wallet. I recommended to the owner that he uses low-level tools to scan his hard disk for the sequence of bytes that could indicate the presence of Bitcoin keys. I don't know whether this has been done. I didn't offer to do it myself because (a) I'm not in the same country, and (b) he uses Windows, with which I'm not familiar.

There's a reason why this paper is nicknamed The Torygraph.

That's not quite how it is. Directors are required to act in the interests of shareholders, but those interests are not necessarily the maximization of profits.

Here's a specific example. In Google's IPO they stated that Google would do lots of "cool stuff" that would not necessarily make money. Therefore, Google's Board is free to do that without fear of a shareholder lawsuit. Google also stated that the share price may go down, "even over the long term", so Google's Board has no legal pressure to keep the share price high. They also stated in the IPO that they would not focus on quarterly earnings, so again there is no legal pressure.

If you don't want to read the lengthy prospectus from Google's 2004 IPO, you can get a taste of what's in it by reading Google's IPO letter from their S-1 IPO Registration Statement:
http://investor.google.com/corporate/2004/ipo-founders-letter.html

Mint Is Not The
Chip He Is Praising

Read the docs. Value can be transferred offline, provided your device has a microSD slot or a USB socket. However, iPhone users will need to be online.

There's a central issuer, but there's no central transaction server. Transactions are validated between the buyer's and seller's device.

The big win for MintChip is ease of use, which may lead to ubiquity. In every other respect, Bitcoin beats it.

Notice how the MintChip website defines "micro transactions" as anything below $10? Although the video does imply that a "nano transaction" of 1c would be possible.

Also we haven't heard anything yet about the fee structure: the fee per transaction, the fee to load/unload value onto a card, the cost to purchase a card, the cost for hosted iPhone services, etc.

The video and website make a big deal about anonymity, but it's only anonymous between purchaser and supplier. This is the least important kind of anonymity, because you are probably going to give the supplier your delivery address anyway. But you need to give the "trusted agent" your bank account details, because it seems that's the only way to get a card (although no doubt they'll be sold on SR for bitcoins in due course).

MintChip is inflatacoin. The system imposes no limit to how much "cash" the issuer can magically create.

If you use wallet accounts, you need to design your business to work the same way as wallet accounts. If the block chain gets reorganized, the wallet account balances may change. And if you need to switch wallets for some reason, it's messy to handle.

On the other hand, most businesses will prefer to work like this: "After some fixed number of confirmations, I credit the customer's account on my database. From that point on, it's the balance in the customer's account on the database that matters, not the balance in the wallet account".

If you are building a business that is critically dependent on wallet accounts, you need to accept the worst-case scenario: that you may need to provide the long-term support yourself, if no-one else is interested. And, due to the wonders of open-source software, you are able to do that.

Hi BioMike,

What's the technology behind the site (e.g. Apache/PHP/MySQL)? And what's the approximate turnover in BTC per day?

Heh, it wasn't mentioned

Take a limited amount of drinking water, crop growth, tar sands, grazing land, etc. Divide by the number of people. In the long run, the countries that breed slowest are going to have the most resources per person.

The slow breeders just have to overcome the demographic bubble of the ageing baby boomers. Luckily, there's lots of economic friction that can be removed from the system, if there is the political will to let the people be prosperous.

Today's paper edition of "The Times" has two lengthy and detailed articles about Silk Road that mention Bitcoins. One of these articles is referenced from the newspaper's front page. There's also a general article about Bitcoins (with a large full-color Bitcoin logo) that mentions -- amongst other things -- Plato's Bitcoin road trip.

Press hits don't get any more mainstream than a prominent feature in The Times of London.

That is actually quite cool, in a "historically significant" sense.

Even though the generated coins can't be spent, Satoshi could auction the private key.

Lower the graphite control rods into the core. The reaction goes subcritical immediately. Nothing tricky here; this is high school physics.

Nuclear power stations are routinely used to handle the peaks in electricity demand, while coal-burning power stations handle the baseline load.

The Japanese didn't spend any money on warfare after WW2.

Put a few percent of GDP to more productive use, and compound the benefits over a few decades, and any country could be rich.

Coal-burning power stations can't be turned off for just one hour, because they take time to get back up to operating temperature.

But hydroelectric and nuclear power stations can easily and efficiently be turned off for an hour (or, in most cases, even for just one minute).

That makes no sense, EskimoBob.

If you think you shouldn't mine because it's bad for the environment, just permanently turn off your rig. If you don't think it's a problem, keep your rig running through that hour.

Is it even possible? The network only hears from a compromised machine when it finds a block, and that machine will probably never find another block. It never hears from the 999,999 compromised machines that are CPU-mining and haven't found a block, yet any of those silent machines might be the one that finds the next block.

That clearly refers to paper notes.

I've seen some of these penny presses that have a sticker explaining (in small print) how and why the machine is legal.

I've also seen penny presses outside of the US that use US pennies, because it is prohibited to reshape the local currency.